Mon 21 Sep 2020, 02:42 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Mark Langabeer, member of Newton Abbott Labour Party
The anti-racist protests in Britain started in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA but also demonstrated opposition to the institutionalised racism in Britain. A recent BBC 3 journalist, Daniel Henry, recently interviewed three young black women who formed a group called Justice for Black Lives, whose main demands were for justice for those who had suffered police brutality and for black history to be included in the education curriculum. Like in America, they also called for partial defunding of the police, with some of the resources given instead to local youth clubs and women’s refuge centres.
The programme interviewed some young people during the actual summer protests and it provided evidence of racial discrimination and disadvantage in Britain. Police are five times more likely to use force against blacks people than white. Only 3.5 per cent of Britain’s population is black, but they account for nearly 20% of those tasered by police. Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched. Youth unemployment among BAME people is double the number in the general population. The British population is 14 per cent BAME, but 25% of Britain’s prisoners are BAMEs. Even during Covid, BAME people are 54% more likely to given fines for failing to follow social distancing rules.
Colonisation and Empire
These are just some of the statistics that show the extent of racial discrimination in the UK. Henry interviewed Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, an anti-racist campaigner who pointed out that colonization and Empire required racism as a justification for the exploitation of peoples of colour and it explains why the Tories and the establishment in general are scared of including the history of Empire in education or removing of statues celebrating slave-traders. It strikes at the heart of British Nationalism and what it stands for.
It is understandable that many protesters support the idea that the police should be partly defunded. For many black people, as one protester pointed out, it is a police force, not a police service. In fact, the police have over 20,000 officers fewer than in 2010 and had already been ‘defunded’ by austerity measures, but Tory austerity has also resulted in the closure of youth clubs and women’s refuges. The Police Federation had an ad campaign which said that , ‘cuts have consequences’.
I’ve had direct experience of this. I attended a TUC disabled conference at Congress House in central London and my car rear window was smashed and some stuff in the boot was stolen. Yet the car was parked outside a hotel and the manager expressed annoyance that the police failed to attend, despite CCTV footage and a eye-witness. For ordinary workers, there is no ‘service’ provided at all.
Law and order ticket
This happened a few weeks before the 2017 general election, when traditionally, Tories run a law and order ticket. This time, however, it was Labour who advocated more police and the Tories were trying to justify the cut in police numbers. In the 2019 general election, the Tories changed tack and promised to restore police numbers to the 2010 level, as well, of course, to introduce longer prison sentences. Whether this was a factor for the change in fortunes for the Tories is unclear. It certainly didn’t do them any harm.
The demand for defunding the police is in my opinion, a falsely skewed in my opinion. The police should be accountable to and democratically controlled by the community that they serve and in that way it should be possible to root out racism. They should be run by elected committees having control over all issues including operational matters. In my view, that is the only way to end the unrepresentative and institutionalised racism that exist in the policing of many areas of the UK.
